


White as Snow, Red as Blood

by Delphi



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Backstory, Cuddling & Snuggling, Hypothermia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 06:20:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5857432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“Once upon a time, there was a boy who went into the Schwarzwald...”</em> Medic recounts a tale from his childhood after a long day at Coldfront.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White as Snow, Red as Blood

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the 2015 round of hc_bingo on DW. Prompt: "Hypothermia". Credit goes entirely to cathouse_mary for the Big Russian Nyet.

Mikhail put his foot down when Medic's lips began to turn blue.

"Inside now."

It was a large foot, in a large boot, and putting it down drove a large crack clean through two inches of ice. The sound was loud enough to scatter the few enterprising carrion birds that had gathered on the abandoned battlefield, but Medic ignored it, as he had ignored the request.

Mikhail in turn disapproved, as he disapproved of this American winter.

The cold would kill back home in Siberia, but it had the decency to kill with indifference. There was nothing malicious about the dry, bone-deep chill of the subarctic, and when a careless man died of exposure there, it was with no more violence than if he had weighted his pockets with stones and walked into the sea. The winter in Coldfront, however, had _teeth_. The weather flew in shrieking from someplace far north of the desert, spitting snow and clawing through damp clothes until even Mikhail found himself shivering.

Dark clouds were moving in, and the first shards of frozen rain began to fall. They bounced off the hard-packed, blood-streaked snow and the clods of scorched earth, pinging like tiny bullets. The rest of the team had shown enough survival sense to retreat once the fight had been settled in their favor, their energies quickly redirected from enemy to comrade as they jostled their way inside to battle for hot water and the best seat by the fire. Victory only kept a man warm for so long.

Only Medic and Mikhail remained in the wilderness: Medic searching through the snow with annoyed determination and Mikhail looming three paces behind with his arms crossed in mounting displeasure.

" _Doktor_ ," he said.

"One m-moment," Medic muttered, his teeth chattering as soon as he pried his jaw apart to speak. "I know it's here s-somewhere."

"Is only bonesaw. It will wait."

"It will _rust_."

"Doktor—"

Mikhail winced when Medic abruptly plunged both hands into a snowbank.

"Ah, here it—" Medic's triumph began prematurely and ended when he pulled out not a bonesaw but a severed arm in a blue pin-striped sleeve. He let out a snarl of frustration and tossed the arm aside. "G-go on, Herr H-heavy. I'll be in la-ater."

The doctor was a very clever man, but he was stupid when it came to winter. Even Soldier and the noisy little Scout knew enough to dress in all their clothes and return indoors as soon as their work was finished. Even Medic's tiny pigeons with their tiny bird brains sprouted more feathers in the winter and tucked their heads beneath their wings when the wind blew cold. Medic, however, went to war in his laboratory coat and gloves made of rubber, and was barely out the door before his hat flew off his head to lie abandoned in the snow behind him.

There was no speaking sense to this kind of man. Whenever Mikhail tried, Medic would only click his tongue at him: _“Tch. I went to medical school in Bavaria, you know."_ He refused to wear the earmuffs Mikhail had bought him ( _"I can't hear with those on"_ ) or to wrap his scarf properly ( _"It makes my glasses fog up when I breathe"_ ), and he seemed convinced that some long-ago student rambling holiday in the Alps had inoculated him against freezing to death in New Mexico.

This left only threats.

"Doktor," Mikhail said again, cracking his knuckles this time. "We are going inside now. You walk or I will carry you."

Medic straightened up indignantly and spun on his heel to argue. Or that was what he tried to do. His boots, built for marching on more temperate terrain, slipped on the ice as he turned. He skidded several feet forward, his eyes wide and his arms pinwheeling madly, before he finally reclaimed his balance.

Mikhail looked at him impassively. _I meant to do that_ , said the stubborn jut of Medic's square jaw, and it might have been funny had his body had been willing to spare blood from his trunk to color his cheeks. Instead, his embarrassed face remained worrisomely pale.

“Now, Doktor.” Mikhail started forward to collect him.

"Herr Heavy..." Medic began reasonably, but Mikhail firmed his jaw in what the doctor had more than once referred to as a Big Russian Nyet. Enough foolishness.

A brief scuffle ensued, undignified on Medic's part and insultingly easy on Mikhail's. There was much cursing and slapping, and one threat of castration against him, but it ended with Mikhail heading back toward the base with Sasha tucked under one arm and Medic slung over the opposite shoulder.

"Heavy! _Wahnsinnige!_ All right, I will walk!"

Two could play the ignoring game. Mikhail allowed the doctor to squawk and struggle as much as he wished as they made their way across the frozen yard. The wind stabbed at him, pelting him with more icy rain as if to say good riddance until he reached the comparative warmth of the covered doorway.

Even the shelter of a derelict building was a mercy in a place like this. The weather was cut short as soon as they crossed the threshold, only a few drafts creeping in around the door and windows as the wind continued to scream outside. Several of their comrades were huddled in front of the fireplace in the main room, none of them looking to be in need of medical attention. The group paid little notice to Medic's predicament, preferring the lively show of Engineer attempting to wrest his rolls of drafting paper away from Soldier before they could be thrown on the fire as fuel.

Mikhail paused briefly at the bottom of the stairs to shore up his grip. Medic had apparently unfrozen enough to rediscover shivering and was vibrating like an unsecured engine.

"H-hea-v-v—"

Mikhail hummed a wordless I-told-you-so and then carried him upstairs and down the hall. Gaining entrance to his quarters required a little juggling, but he soon maneuvered all three of them inside and kicked the door shut behind them. The room was dark and still held a lingering stuffy warmth from the fire that had been burning in the stove before the enemy's attack. Mikhail set Sasha safely on her pedestal, promising to see to her later, and then tossed Medic onto the bed.

"Stay."

A self-righteous sputter lost some of its effect to muffling as Medic immediately curled up and buried his face in the bearskin blanket that Mikhail's mama had sent for his birthday. Mikhail piled more wood in the stove and fostered a fire. When it had caught, he filled up the kettle from the tap and put it on to boil.

"Off with wet things," he declared, returning to the bedside and kneeling down.

Medic scowled at him, still shivering. He had made no move to improve his situation, save to fumble out his handkerchief and blow his running nose. That was fine. Mikhail did not require any meaningful cooperation in order to unstrap the Quick-Fix pack from the doctor's back and pull off his boots. He set the device aside and placed the boots next to the stove to dry. Next came Medic's sodden socks, peeled off with a wet squelch. They were good wool, but that had made little difference once the snow had got at them.

"Sss!" Medic pressed his face into his arm as Mikhail took one bare foot in each hand.

He rubbed them gently, working the circulation back into them until the pale, damp skin grew rosy again. Medic made further sounds of protest, Mikhail's touch obviously burning him, but his toes wiggled in experimental pleasure as the blood flow returned.

The coat took more wrangling, as Medic insisted on staying curled up, but it was eventually removed without any ripping. The same could not be said for Medic's gloves, which had frozen to the point of brittleness and tore when Mikhail pried them off to get to the doctor's numb fingertips.

"I can d-do it," Medic insisted, giving up on playing dead in favor of rolling onto his back and trying to bat Mikhail's hands away. It might have been less reminiscent of a half-drowned kitten if there wasn’t so much trembling. Medic made a valiant attempt to unfasten his suspenders, but his hands proved too clumsy to manage the clasps.

Mikhail caught them and pressed them between his own. It was like holding a block of ice, one that did not easily melt in his warmer grasp. Medic groaned at what had to be pins and needles the size of daggers and wiggled until he could swing his feet off the bed and press them to Mikhail's chest for more heat. There was another hiss, but relief seemed to be winning out over agony. Mikhail rubbed the life back into the doctor's fingers, occasionally blowing warm breath on them, before relinquishing them to begin work on his shirt and trousers.

"Ah-ha, I s-see how it is," Medic declared, fixing Mikhail with an unimpressively quaking come-hither look. "If you want me ou-out of my c-clothes, you need only a-ask."

"Da," Mikhail replied blandly, carefully removing Medic's glasses and setting them atop the stack of crates that served as a bedside table. "I wish to make love to frozen corpse. I will go find dead Spy hand for foreplay."

Medic kicked him in the chest as Mikhail finished stripping him down. Mikhail grunted but otherwise ignored the show of aggression in favor of efficiency. Once Medic was bare, he yanked on the edge of the bearskin blanket, billowed it out with a tremendous _whap_ , and then settled it over him. He collected the damp clothes and brought them to the stove to dry just as the kettle was boiling.

“Cluck, cluck,” Medic said sourly from beneath the blanket when he saw that Mikhail was making tea. “That is you being a mother hen.”

His teeth had stopped chattering, but Mikhail doubted he had the strength or coordination to fight his way out from under the bearskin. He chose not to dignify the comment with an answer; black tea cured many ills. He put two tea bags in a tin cup and filled it with the boiling water.

“I’m not even cold,” Medic insisted, and sniffed. “I went to medical school in Bavaria, you know.”

“I know this,” Mikhail said.

“I once hiked through the Alps in the middle of—”

“I know this too.”

“Then stop fussing. I’ve had hypothermia before. I know what it feels like.”

This, Mikhail had not known. “When did this happen?”

Medic burrowed down further under the blanket until only the top of his head was visible. “When I was a boy.”

The number of stories Medic had told him about his boyhood could be counted on fewer than the fingers of one hand. There was the time he was birched at school for having a stubborn face. The time he made himself sick on brandy at his grandmother’s house. The time he briefly reanimated the family dog after its untimely meeting with the milk truck. 

This was the way of their business, Mikhail supposed. They did not even know each other’s first names, despite having been intimate for the better part of the year. That did not mean that Mikhail was not imprudently curious.

“How old?” he asked, bringing the cup of tea to the bedside.

“Thirteen.” Medic ventured one hand out from under the blanket, just far enough to grab the cup and bring it back under with him.

It didn’t surprise him. If Medic was this foolish about winter now, he would have been worse at thirteen, when all boys were foolish. He undressed, making short work of his sensible layers and then joined Medic under the blanket. The mattress sagged in the middle, the sides rolling in to embrace them both cozily as he tucked Medic’s head under his chin and captured cold feet between his calves. One hand found both of Medic’s and sandwiched them around the cup of tea to keep them warm. He resigned himself to tea-spotted sheets.

“Tell me this,” he said.

Medic cooed like one of his pigeons as he made himself comfortable in Mikhail’s arms. “Does little Heavy want a bedtime story?”

Mikhail refused to be distracted by the mockery. “Da.”

While he would have preferred that Medic save his breath and rest, telling a story would keep him from traipsing off. Hopefully long enough for him to bring his temperature back up to normal.

Medic huffed. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who went into the Schwarzwald. He became hypothermic and nearly died. The end.”

“Why did he into this Schwarzwald?” Mikhail rolled the name on his tongue, liking the sound of it. The Black Forest. 

“His family visited there every winter, for a skiing holiday.”

“He was skiing in the woods? Alone?” 

“He went into the woods with his father. They were hunting.”

Mikhail considered what they hunted in Germany in the winter. “Deer?”

Medic was silent for a moment, though Mikhail heard the soft sound of his lips parting to reply. He repositioned himself, getting the cup to his lips and slurping the half-steeped tea, and then made an unhappy sound when he evidently burned his tongue. “Schwein. He was hunting pig.”

A smile came to Mikhail’s lips despite himself. He was impressed. “Boar? Very dangerous for little boy.”

He heard an answering smile in Medic’s voice. “Not so little. I was as tall as my father that winter.”

Mikhail tried to picture Medic at thirteen. The image that came to him was one of a thin, scholarly youth, not yet in possession of the broad shoulders or square jaw that would make him a striking man. This imaginary boy was wide-eyed, stumbling a little in the snow on feet he would grow into later. He was bundled up in a checked coat, with a shearling hat pulled over his ears and a red muffler over his nose and mouth. His breathing fogged up his horn-rimmed spectacles, causing him to blink like an irritated owl. The picture was very charming. 

“I’ve never seen this Schwarzwald,” Mikhail prompted when it seemed Medic would not continue. 

“No?” Medic braved another slurp of the tea. “It is beautiful. The mountains. Trees so thick that even in wintertime, the light comes in like lace. Little rivers everywhere.”

Mikhail hummed, picturing the old forests he had known in Central Europe. With the fire warming up the room and Medic thawing beside him, the hail of frozen rain on the outside wall began to sound more benign.

“It wasn’t meant to snow that day. The boy’s father had decided this, even though the sky was gray when they set out that morning. It would not snow, _verdammt_ , the man told his wife before they left. And then it did, and he was angry. He was always angry when things didn’t go his way. He would have beaten the sky too, if he was taller.”

The ‘too’ caught Mikhail’s ear.

"By the afternoon, the sky was like milk-glass. The boy and his father could not see one way from another. All this time, the snow kept falling, as if to spite the man. The boy laughed. It was ridiculous, all this temper about the weather, and he was old enough to know it now. The man..."

After a moment of silence, Mikhail prompted him again. "What?"

"The man was in a frightful temper." 

He could hear this smile too. It was not Medic's pleased smile, or the dizzy smile that accompanied the manic joy of strange research, but the humourless prying back of lips from teeth. _“He would have beaten the sky too…”_

"There was no telling him that he was wrong, and so the boy followed the pig deeper into the woods."

"The boar?" Mikhail asked, trying to imagine the scene properly. The boy, yes, and a sour-faced man who was not as tall as his son would become. Father and son hunting, pursuing their quarry past the point of good sense in bad weather. 

"Ja," Medic agreed. "The snow was soon falling so hard that the boy could not see more than a few feet ahead, but he followed in the pig's tracks, very quietly."

This was surprisingly sensible, Mikhail thought, for a boy who would grow into a man that did not button his coat. It would have been easy to wander in circles, with no markers to find a path out of an unfamiliar forest. An animal would seek shelter in bad weather, unlike a certain doctor he knew, and whatever deeper brush would protect a boar would protect a boy as well.

"The boy saw it then. For what it was."

There was a strange tone to Medic’s voice, and the words made little sense. Mikhail’s index and middle fingers moved forward, surreptitiously pressing to Medic's wrist under the blankets. His pulse was steady. Perhaps he was only growing tired. Mikhail himself could have easily been lulled off by the warmth of their shared body heat and the vibration of Medic's voice against his chest, if he weren't keeping watch.

"What it was?" he echoed.

"The boy had been following the pig at a safe distance. It had looked so large to him until that moment. It was a great big hairy creature—rabid, ja? The boy had believed it would kill him. He had believed it _could_ kill him."

Mikhail relaxed, satisfied that Medic was not slurring. He did not think wild pigs contracted rabies, and even a small one could easily kill a large man with only one lucky catch of its tusk. However, it was not worth starting an argument over, not thirty years later. 

"But the boy saw it clearly then. He saw it look to the sky and know that it was lost. He saw that it was frightened. He understood that it was only an animal. That was when he knew he could kill it."

"He shot this boar?"

"Nein." He heard Medic lick his lips. "My father had the gun. I had only a knife."

Mikhail had to grin at the sheer ambition of it. He knew that Medic-the-man was capable of bold action with a blade, but he had been picturing the boy as a softer creature, clumsy with youth and daunted by the storm. Obviously Medic had survived the encounter, and so he listened with interest as the story continued. 

"I crept up behind the pig. He almost moved too fast for me to keep pace, but my legs were long that year. I followed him, deeper and deeper into the forest, and around and around until his legs were tired and mine were not. He stopped then. He looked up at the snow still falling, and he made a stupid animal sound in frustration."

Medic paused and tried another sip of tea.

"And then I did it."

"Did what?”

"I leapt on him. I drove the knife in here—" Medic poked one finger free from under the blankets and gestured to the side of his throat. "—and I _pulled_. He tried to throw me off, but I stuck it in again, and again, and again. There was so much blood. A great spray of it into the snow."

"You killed it like this?" Mikhail was surprised. Wild pigs were hearty animals. He had seen full-grown butchers take out their sharpest knives and cut twice to bleed out one that had already been knocked on the head.

"It was much easier than I thought it would be. The knife slid in with no effort at all. The pig bled out quickly. Twenty seconds, thirty. He was dead.” He shrugged. “That part was quick. It was what happened after that kept me there until nightfall."

"Butchering," Mikhail said, nodding approvingly. Good meat was not to be wasted.

"Ja. Butchering." Medic laughed softly. "That was the difficult part. I had rope in my pack, but I had been thoughtless. I had killed the pig under the spruce trees. Those branches were too _geschmeidig_...too bending to hang it from. I had to drag the body to an oak tree. That took a very long time. I pulled and pulled, but it seemed as if I could only move it an inch at a time. I was tall that year, but I did not weigh so much."

"Little boy's eyes were bigger than his stomach."

Medic laughed again, sounding even dreamier this time. "Maybe. But I persevered. I tied him by the ankles and pulled him up, eventually. The snow fell everywhere, from the sky, from the tree branches, making me blind. I had to undress him—"

 _'Dress him,'_ Mikhail meant to correct him. It was not often his English was better than the doctor's, but he knew this word for gutting and skinning. He smiled, and he was poised to speak when another image flickered suddenly in his mind: blood in the snow, his mother’s hand in his own and Bronislava in the crook of his arm as they ran from the camp. He paused uncertainly and ultimately held his tongue.

“I had dissected many small creatures, you understand. Earthworms, frogs. A bat once. This wasn’t tidy work like that. It was too big. I made a dreadful mess of it. I had to pull very hard to get the belly open, three, four times, and when it all spilled out, mein Gott, the _steam_."

Mikhail could picture it. When he was a boy, he had imagined he was watching the soul escape and rise up on shimmering air.

"I had to take off my coat and shirt and trousers. That was when I got into trouble. It was too cold for that, but already I could not feel it."

“Trousers?" Mikhail had to ask.

"So I didn't get blood on them." Medic said this as if it were obvious. "It took so long, I exhausted myself. All I could hear was my breathing and my heart beating - badum, badum, badum. Do you remember what it was like then, before there were always cars and airplanes everywhere? So still. So quiet.”

“Da,” Mikhail said and suddenly, foolishly wanted to tell him of Siberia.

"It stopped snowing when it got dark. The temperature plummeted, and the air was so cold it hurt to breathe. It was so much harder than I had imagined. I began to think I would die out there. The killing was easy, but to cut him up took so long."

Mikhail pictured him, that narrow boy. No powerful chest, no strong arms that could lift all of the men on their team save for him. He pictured the boy struggling, the rope abrading his hands when he tried to raise and lower the beast. A stubborn jaw. Frustrated tears coming to his eyes as he tried to carve up a carcass that outweighed him by half. 

“What I wouldn’t have given for a bone saw. I had to pry him apart by the joints, by hand. Twist them hard. He began to freeze. I made a fire to burn what was left—”

Here, Mikhail did not even try to correct him to ‘cook’.

"I should have stayed and warmed myself. I couldn't feel my limbs by then. But the wood was wet and it made too much smoke. So much fat and hair. It stank and sizzled. Even that wouldn’t burn. The temperature wasn’t hot enough. What do boys know about this?"

"Nothing," Mikhail said quietly.

"Nothing,” Medic said, and sighed. “I had to bury the fire under the snow. I walked and walked, scattering what was left for the animals. I could barely move by that time. My hands...I had nicked myself several times, you understand. I was so cold they wouldn't bleed."

"How did you find your way out?"

"There were lights. I crawled up a hill and saw them at the edge of the forest. A search party had been brought together. My mother was there. She was weeping."

Medic propped himself up on one elbow so that he could drink properly. He took a hearty swallow.

"And your father?" Mikhail finally asked.

Medic shook his head dismissively. "Oh, they never found him. The Schwarzwald is very deep. I told them that he had fallen down into the river. I showed them the cuts on my hands and the places where the rope had burned me. I said I had tried to climb down to him, but the current carried him away. "

Mikhail thought slowly about this and then leaned forward, his heart full of affection, and kissed the doctor's damp hair. "Mama was happy to see her little boy?"

“She wasn't as pleased as I thought she would be.” Medic seemed to consider that unhappily for a moment and then laughed again. “Mothers,” he said, shrugging in a way that asked what could be done about such creatures.

“Mothers,” Mikhail agreed, putting up with another tongue-clucking as he checked Medic's circulation and fussed at the blanket, ensuring he was properly covered as he drank his tea. 

He lay in silent contemplation for a time afterwards, his arm around Medic’s middle. He listened to the contented sips, the wind and the rain, and the roar of laughter from downstairs. Finally, he said: “You would like where I am from. There is good hunting in the season when animals come from the south. Is very still. Very quiet.”

Medic finished his tea and shivered. It was a brief, barely perceptible tremor. Then, with a soft exhalation, he eased back in Mikhail’s arms as if the very last of the cold had finally been purged from him, and combined a maybe-so hum with a broad yawn. The latter proved contagious, and Mikhail did his best to stifle his own against Medic’s shoulder. Perhaps they would go hunting together some day, he thought, and smiled to himself at the idea of Medic (in a proper coat, and hat, and mittens of course) painting the frozen landscape red by his side in the indifferent killing winter of Siberia.


End file.
